"Oh, you know; they do everything for money. But yet there is more greatness in the American character. They are mechanical. They are practical. They don't get cheated by unscrupulous lawyers.
"Are you married?" asked the American, sympathetically.
"No, thank God!" he replied, with more energy than he had yet shown.
"Some men," commented the American, "find a friend in a wife."
"That depends on a man's character. It increases the loneliness of some men," replied the inventor, smiling in spite of what he was saying.
"You seem to me to be rather pessimistic," remarked the American.
"No, I am not pessimistic. I understand that a pessimist thinks life is worse than it is, but I see things just as they are; that is all. When I came to New York I was enthusiastic, too; I was an optimist. I saw life as it is not. But the mists have passed from before my eyes, and I see things just as they are."
He loves literature with an absorbing love, and is pained constantly by what he deems the chaos of art in the United States. The Americans seem to him to be trivial and immature in their art, lacking in serious purpose.
"It is a vast and fruitful land," he will say, "but there is no order and little sincerity as far as art is concerned. Your writers try to amuse the readers, to entertain them merely, rather than to give them serious and vital truth. Why is it that a race which is clever and progressive in all mechanical and industrial matters, which in such things has no overpowering respect for the past, is weighed down in art by a regard for all the literary ghosts of bygone times? Look at the books put forth in any one year in the United States! What a senseless hodgepodge it is! Variety of all kinds, historical novels, short stories, social plays, costume plays, bindings, illustrations, _editions de luxe_, new editions of books written in all ages alongside of the latest productions of the day. The Americans have great tact in most things. They are the cleverest people in the world, and yet they are very backward in literature.
"Indeed the whole Anglo-Saxon race, great economically and practically as it is, is curiously at sea and chaotic in all that pertains to literary art. There are men of genius, great artists among them, but they are artists only in part, fragmentarily, artists without being aware of it, with no consistent and clear understanding of what art is. Your great men are hindered by their environment. America and England are the most difficult countries in the world for real art to get a hearing, for all the people insist on being amused by their authors. They treat them as they do their actors, merely as public servants whose duty it is to amuse the public when it is tired. But art is a serious thing, instinct with sincerity, and should never be lightly approached either by the artist or the reader.